What can we do when evolution doesn't play by the rules?

The tree-of-life is now widely recognised as the way to represent the evolutionary past of the species living on earth today. Indeed, as well as representing the evolutionary history of species, evolutionary trees are commonly used in applications such as tracking the spread of pathogens, measuring biodiversity, and understanding how important traits in animals and plants have evolved.

Even so, it is now known that the evolution of certain species can break the rules of vertical descent that are implicitly implied by the tree-of-life. For example, viruses can recombine, plants and animals can hybridise, and microbes can swap genes. Evolutionary processes such as these are not of minor importance: for example, recombinant viruses can cause epidemics, hybrid crops can produce greater yields, and microbes can borrow genes to gain antimicrobial resistance.

In this talk, we will consider the problem of how to represent the evolution of species whose evolutionary histories misbehave, including a couple of examples of New Zealand species along the way. As we shall see, this not only provides useful tools to help understand complex evolutionary histories but also leads to some fascinating mathematical and computational challenges.

Speaker

Vincent Moulton is Professor in Computational Biology at University of East Anglia (UEA). After completing his undergraduate studies at University of Warwick in 1987, he moved to the USA, where he completed an MSc at University of Washington in 1991, and his PhD at Duke University in 1994. He then worked as a researcher at University of Bielefeld, DE, and University of Canterbury/Massey University, NZ. In 1997 he moved to Sweden, where he was a Senior Lecturer at Mid Sweden University and, as of 2002, Professor in Bioinformatics at Uppsala University. He then joined UEA in 2004.

During his career, amongst other things, Moulton was an invited participant at the 2025 three-month program in phylogenomics at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics, Brown University, he was the principal organiser of the ‘Phylogenetics’ programme, held at The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in 2007, he was on the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, NZ, and he was Head of the School of Computing Sciences at UEA. He is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and is coauthor of the book 'Basic Phylogenetic Combinatorics'.